The first trivittatus offspring

October 10th, 2004

dagboek-gifkkerkas16.jpgIn the meantime we have since 2 months a young trivittatus. It is a real beauty. The first ones had unfortunately spindly legs, then one with 3 legs and finely the last one of the same clutch, healthy and quite active. We raise him separately, not in the greenhouse, we do not want to take a risk with our first young trivittatus. Lately we have not found any clutches of the trivittatus anymore, but according to their active whistling from the last couple of days, there must be coming a clutch again. But there are that many spots to lay their clutches unseen, the greenhouse is becoming a little jungle.
Last week, we saw for almost a week, several fights between a tricolor and a ventri. A tricolor decided to have its clutch at a spot at the large bromeliad, were a ventri couple has regulary their clutches. So the ventri was very discontent. Every day real fights, in which the tricolor was worsted every time. The fights took often about 10-15 minutes, until the tricolor finely got driven away for at least a meter. But as a good dad he could not leave his clutch unprotected, so he kept returning to his clutch. As soon as the ventri was not near, he returned to his clutch, but the ventri watched him also from far, so soon followed other fights. 2 Days ago the clutch was gone, probably dad succeeded in bringing the larva’s away, there are several just put down tad-poles at the pond.
We still have not had offspring of the ventri’s, we see often clutches or tadpoles in the bromeliads, but never young ones. 2 Months ago we thought, let us get some larva’s out of the bromeliad, to see if we can bring them up. You almost always see the ventri’s, really almost everywhere in the greenhouse, even on the most weirdest spots. As we only have 6 ventri’s in the greenhouse, we thought we would love to have a few more. While we brought up the tadpoles, we were amazed that they grew so fast, but soon it was obvious the tadpoles were too big to be ventri tadpoles. A few weeks ago we saw a familiar drawing at the back of the tadpoles, leucomelas. They just came ashore. Leucomelas who show cuckoos behaviour? We found the tadpoles in a bromeliad armpit, where the ventri had put down already several clutches and tadpoles before. And the ventri’s kept returning to that armpit. Smart of the leucomelas, did they see the ventri tadpoles as food for their own tadpoles? So still no young ventri’s. Not all the frogs prefer to put down their tadpoles in running water, the places with the less current turned out to be the favourite spots to put down larva’s. So last week we made a little pool in the other corner of the green house. How long does it take before we find the first tadpole in that pool? Several frogs already inspected the pool.